Let’s talk about having a content strategy marketing plan. Why is it important?
Well, it helps guide a business toward how to use its online footprint to reach potential customers.
To put it another way, it refines the processes by which the company promotes itself.
With that said, let’s look at a few things that a content marketing plan should include, and this will give you a better idea of how one of these plans works.
What Your Content Marketing Plan Should Include
First of all, your plan should include specific goals for the business. How will the content work with core operations and complement what the business is doing? What are the metrics that you’re seeking to reach? What are the outcomes that you want?
Then there’s insight into your audience – who are you trying to attract?
In addition, a good plan can include planning on different types of content – blog posts, white papers, LinkedIn articles, etc. that will all act as parts of a concerted whole when it comes to marketing.
You can also talk about adding a promotion plan that combines the above ideas with a marketing roadmap that will guide your people as they go.
Eight Steps to a Content Marketing Plan: Part One
Now, let’s talk about the first four of eight steps in creating your content plan. In a follow-up blog post, we’ll continue with the other four…
1. Set a Goal
As mentioned, a lot of this work is about setting goals for the business. You may have specific sales targets that you feel may be achieved partially through content marketing. You may have a particular kind of visibility that you want to accomplish.
Whatever it is, having it in the plan will be to your advantage.
2. Understand your Audience
In coming up with this content plan, you want to spend significant time and effort thinking about who your audience is.
You can identify a target audience and then identify various segments. In terms of research, you might be using:
- Feedback like net promoter scores
- Customer purchase histories
- Evaluation of influencer sites
All of this and more can guide your evaluation of your audience as a whole, which will be extremely helpful as you go.
3. Choose Content Types
One of the next steps in this plan is to come up with a mix of different content types that will work for the business.
Business leaders will want to think about where things will be posted and how they will work to promote the company in general.
4. Find Topic Ideas
To some people, this is the fun part – they have all their initial planning in place, and they want to find topics that are going to be engaging for their chosen and identified audience.
One way to do that is by looking at recommended SEO keywords for a particular business. You can dovetail it with other kinds of advertising and develop a more targeted way to reach people on your website or elsewhere in a digital space where your business is being promoted.
That’s all for today – we’ll follow up later with the second part of this guide!
